That's the mistake many people make in thinking about precious metals or the like.
Gold and Silver only have value because humans assign them value and since humans do, like many other things you can trade them easily.
In true desperate times, including times of governments turning against the people, gold and silver may be of little use.
What Gold and silver offer, is a way to save some wealth in the good times and hide it away during the bad times so that when the good times come again you are a bit better off than the rest.
If you study the past 5000 years+ of history, the bad times, even truly catastrophic civilization ending stuff doesn't last forever. Eventually the survivors group together into towns or villages and start the whole society thing over one way or another and eventually trade and commerce restart.
Modern folks don't understand that entire "modern" civilizations for their day have collapsed practically into dust over and over.